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In last week’s thread there was extensive discussion on the retirement home employee shortage in the US. It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed? That is, whatever system of care that is set up is not designed and should not be designed to basically prop you up and coddle you otherwise? It may sound cynical or too far-fetched to say it out loud, but looking at this issue from the outside, it’d explain many things. I imagine this is a general rule most Boomers also take as given, as they grew up in an age when childlessness and family dissolution/dislocation was much less normal than today.
With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.
The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation. But a lot of people are scared of bringing out the stick when it comes to raising birth rates.
Everything before "you’re going to have an awful end of life situation" is superfluous. Like how are a few kids who occasionally come and pity you, going to make the slow decay and daily pain of old age that much more bearable? It could be worse, they could take care of you, and you'll die knowing you ruined a portion of life of a still functioning human you love. When my grandma was in a retirement home, we made sure never to tell her that the value of her modest house had long ago been consumed by the cost, or she would have eaten the pills.
Why? I enjoyed hanging out with older relatives almost every week until they died, many people in traditional communities actually incorporate the elderly into daily life, they’re at the dinner table, at the park, in the garden, at the tavern having a beer with everyone else. They’re looking after grandchildren, they’re providing sage advice, they’re part of the family and community. I’m not talking about the last six months on your deathbed, I’m talking about what in many cases is the last decade or more of life.
If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life. I'm talking about the time where they can't look after themselves, let alone grandchildren. When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus. Maybe you haven’t experienced old age dementia. People who can’t walk ten paces unassisted without falling, who have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time, and who linger for years in pain and confusion.
As @BurdensomeCount says, in many cases (especially those that don’t involve dementia) there’s a long, slow decline between being old enough to retire, old enough to be elderly, old enough to maybe no longer be fully entirely independent (but also not useless or a vegetable) and old enough to need round the clock care.
‘Assisted living facilities’ in the US (etc) are full of people who could continue to play important, valuable and prosocial roles in their communities and families. That’s obvious in as much as these homes are often full of their own kind of communities, which the elderly recreate after being abandoned by their families.
I find your present idyllic view of our elders difficult to reconcile with your callousness towards them during covid, which was basically, why should society care at all about the economically unproductive?
My view of them during Covid was that sacrificing the entire economy to protect them was both futile and stupid, not that individual families (or nursing homes etc) couldn’t take steps to protect them. Firstly, most elderly people easily survived Covid, including nonagenarians and centenarians. Secondly, to me, life extension (past a point) is less important than quality of life. The failure state isn’t grandma dying during a global pandemic, sad as that is, it’s grandma spending the last decade of her life separated from her family and community. And most old people are pretty reasonable in my experience, they don’t want to see their children and grandchildren suffer to slightly increase their chance of living another handful of years.
I'd argue that lockdowns, in the way they were designed and enforced, didn't even end up protecting the elderly.
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